An electronic exchange provides a matching process between buyers and sellers. Some well known electronic exchanges include Eurex, London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (“LIFFE”), Euronext, Chicago Mercantile Exchange (“CME”), Chicago Board of Trade (“CBOT”), Xetra, and Island. Buyers and sellers, collectively referred to as traders, are typically connected to one or more electronic exchanges by way of a communication link. The traders submit buy or sell orders to the electronic exchange over the communication link. They also obtain price information and order fill information from the exchange.
Electronic exchanges are becoming successful venues for trading. Indeed, an increasing number of people are actively participating in a market at any one given time. The increase in the number of potential market participants has advantageously led to, among other things, a more competitive market and greater liquidity than with traditional methods of trading, such as open outcry.
Traders sometimes prefer to trade only one tradable object at a time, and sometimes traders wish to trade more than one tradable object at a time in a strategy referred to as spreading or strategy trading. As used herein, tradable objects may include, but are not limited to, all types of traded financial products, such as, for example, stocks, options, bonds, futures, currency, and warrants, as well as funds, derivatives and collections of the foregoing. Moreover, tradable objects may include all types of commodities, such as grains, energy, and metals. A tradable object may be “real”, such as products that are listed by an exchange for trading, or “synthetic”, such as a combination of real products that is created by the trader. A tradable object could actually be a combination of other tradable object, such as a class of tradable objects.
As mentioned above, some traders trade one tradable object. For example, a trader might trade the June 2002 corn contract. That is, the trader is offering to buy or willing to sell the corn contract, depending on his or her trading strategy. Likewise, a trader might trade a December 2003 corn contract, a corn contract from another month or another type of contact altogether. As is common, however, traders may trade more than one tradable object at a time. For example, a trader may buy multiple different tradable objects, sell multiple different tradable objects, or buy and sell a combination of different tradable objects. While the different buys and sells may comprise unrelated positions for the trader, they may alternatively be part of a specific trading strategy—such as a spread.
Spreading is a trading strategy that traders might use to hedge risk. That is, a spread can be used to reduce the trader's downside risk of trading a tradable object. A spread generally includes buying at least one tradable object and, usually at the same time, selling at least one different tradable object. For example, a trader could spread trade the June 2002 corn contract and the December 2003 corn contract, such as buying the June 2002 corn contract and selling the December 2003 corn contract, or vice versa.
In this example, the June/December corn contract spread has two legs. The June 2002 corn contact makes one leg, while the December 2003 corn contract makes the second leg. The legs refer to the portions of the trade associated with each individual tradable object, which can also be referred to as an outright market. A spread, however, can have more than two legs. Additionally, spreads can be created based on relationships other than calendar months. One such example would be trading a 10 year note and a 5 year note, however, other examples also exist.
As previously described, spreads may reduce a trader's downside risk when compared to trading a single outright position. The tradable objects comprising the legs of a spread ordinarily share a price correlation. Thus, their prices generally move in the same direction. For example, a decrease in the price of one leg would then generally correspond to a decrease in the price of another leg. Placing opposing trades, such as buying one leg and selling the other leg, reduces the potential downside risk, because a decrease in the price of one leg (e.g., the buy leg) that causes the trader to lose money would be offset by the corresponding decrease in the price of the other leg (e.g., the sell leg) that causes the trader to gain money.
Common to trading most tradable objects, when a trader places an order for a tradable object, the trader needs only to put up a fraction of the value of the tradable object. This is oftentimes referred to as margin trading, and it allows the trader to trade a much larger amount of the tradable object than if the trader simply bought or sold the tradable object outright (e.g., by paying cash). In order to trade on margin, a trader generally deposits a certain amount of cash in a margin account with a trading house, which the trader uses to access the exchange. In return, the trading house grants the trader a margin balance, which is typically greater than the amount of cash the trader deposited in the margin account. The trader can then buy and sell tradable object against the margin balance.
Each tradable object position held by a trader, whether a long position or a short position, has associated with it a margin requirement, sometimes also called a margin amount. The margin requirement generally refers to an amount of margin required to hold that position. When the trader's initial order for position is filled, the margin requirement for that position is deducted from the trader's margin account. The margin requirement for that position, however, does not necessarily remain fixed. Changes in the market price for the position may cause a corresponding change in the position's margin requirement, thereby also affecting the balance in the trader's margin account. Of course, factors other than the market price for the position may alter the margin requirement.
Usually, a clearing house computes the margin requirements after every trading session, sometimes referred to as post-trade risk calculation. There are many different types of margin requirements usually depending on the type of tradable object and clearing house. However, in general, a spread position is usually considered to be a lower risk strategy than an outright long or an outright short position, and therefore margin requirements for spreads are often much less than for outright positions. For example, if the price trend of a tradable object is currently up and the trader is in a spread, (e.g., short one month and long another) the gain on the long position would likely offset the loss of the short position, and vice-versa. One side of the spread typically hedges the other, therefore the lower margin requirements.
One well known tool for computing margin requirements in circumstances such as these is Standard Portfolio Analysis of Risk (“SPAN”), which is a margining system developed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (“CME”). SPAN uses a set of pre-determined parameters set by the clearing house to assess what the maximum potential loss will be for a given portfolio over a one-day period. SPAN and systems like SPAN are typically used at the end of the trading day to recompute margin requirements for a trader's outstanding positions and thereby to also recompute the available margin in the trader's margin account.
The parameters used by SPAN in computing the margin requirements can take into account various different factors. For example, SPAN can recognize that two opposing outright positions of similar tradable objects (e.g., a buy of one tradable object and a sell of another similar tradable object) may in fact comprise a spread. Thus, instead of trading the spread as a single tradable object (e.g., trading in a spread market), the trader may have separately purchased the legs of the spread (e.g., trading individual legs in an outright market). As previously explained, the spread has less of a risk associated with it than with uncorrelated outright positions. Therefore, the two outright positions comprising the spread should have a lower margin requirement than if they were considered as separate outright positions.
The margin requirement calculations performed by SPAN, while accounting for many different market factors, are computationally intensive. Therefore, they are not well suited for real-time use while the exchange is open for trading. If they were used during the trading day, for example as a pre-trade calculation to determine if a trader has enough available margin to place a trade, they would cause an unreasonable delay in executing the trade. This may cause the trader to miss placing the trade, for example, if the market had already moved away from the trader's order price, or they may cause the trader to have a less advantageous position in the queue for open orders at the particular price level for that trade. Additionally, as SPAN was designed for use at the end of the trading day, it does not take into account the margin requirements of working orders.
In spite of the limitations of SPAN, trading houses and individual traders still attempt to keep track of their margin requirements throughout the day; however, this is currently done with much more simplistic methods. Current pre-trade calculations are usually done by determining the number of markets in which a trader has a position and then multiplying those positions by the margin requirement for outright legs. These quick calculations are not sophisticated enough to determine which of the outright positions may in fact comprise legs of a spread. Therefore, such calculations assume that the trader is only trading in outright long or short positions and not spread positions. As a result, the margin requirements are typically higher than they should be, which is not an accurate representation of the true margin requirements of the positions taking into account spreads and other trading strategies.
Therefore, there exists a need for an improved risk management system that can be used for real time pre-trade risk calculations.